We are now open for our second funding round of the year! We will be giving up to £40,000 to around 30 grass-roots groups, campaigning for effective social change. We will be accepting applications until Monday 16th September.

The funding process is democratic and participatory, and involves people directly affected by the issues you are campaigning on. We hope this makes the process fair and accountable to applicants and out members. Please check out this page for a little more information about our funding process works.

The deadline for applications is midnight on 16th September.

You will find out if you are short-listed toward the end of November, and grants will paid out from the end of January.

This funding round has been made possible by an action inquiry with Lankelly Chase Foundation, who will be learning about Edge Fund's participatory grant making methods during this funding round.

We need your support!

Donations

We can only open for applications when we have raised enough money for a funding round. We welcome donations large and small, and particularly small monthly donations of £5 or £10 as they help us plan for the future. Please donate if you can, so we can keep supporting those taking action for a just and equal world.

Publicity

Help us get the word out! Follow us on twitter or sign up for our email list here. Please help us reach people and groups who don’t normally hear about funding opportunities – share this post or via social media and email but don’t forget to also tell people at meetings, events etc, especially if you know they are not often online. We have leaflets and cards we can send to anyone who can help distribute them to people and groups who might be interested in applying. Get in touch if you can help. Thank you!

Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) is a grassroots user–led direct action group, although we also carry out other activities like research, lobbying MPs and councillors, peer support and a host of other things. As well as a national group there are many local groups which operate autonomously around the country.

Most recently we have been removing thousands of Metro newspapers around the country every Wednesday as they have been paid over £250,000 of our money by DWP to publish a series of lies about Universal Credit. We also delivered thousands of these back to Amber Rudd at DWP Head office where our activists were locked into the building by security.

Edge Fund is one of the few sources of income we have and without this funding neither national or our local groups would be able to undertake as much as we do now and we wouldn’t be able to support our activists to travel to take part in our actions.

Foil Vedanta is a grassroots solidarity group focused primarily on challenging the systematically injust mining practices of British multinational mining giant, Resources, once called the world’s most hated mining company, and one of the largest contributors of CO2. They have operations in Zambia, South Africa, Australia, India and more with plans to continue expansion.

We use our privilege and access as residents of the UK and act as a conduit to disseminate knowledge as a tool of resistance. We aim to strengthen and support the movements by linking communities, through critical research, gathering testimonies and scientific evidence, meeting with lawyers, politicians, calling for true accountability for human rights abuses, illegal operations and ecocide and the transformation of such systems. The funds we secured will go towards sustaining this work, extending outreach and vital updates to our website to maintain the flow of communication. As a grassroots organisation and due to the nature of our work it is a struggle to secure funding that doesn’t come with invasive conditions.

Edge Fund’s application process is simple and transparent. The questions offer a chance for reflection on where your group is at with the work and the team at Edge Fund is easy to reach. It’s clear they trust the groups as the experts to use the money to enhance the work where needed. The funding day brought together activists and organisations from around the country to share their work, successes and challenges. It is one of the few spaces that accommodates so many causes while giving them all equal platform. In addition to the funding, the connections formed here are invaluable.

This report on our 10th funding day was sent in by Dennis, from Misson Springs, a group campaigning against fracking in Misson Springs, near Doncaster.

The funding day was excellent, and I am really glad I went. I have found that socio-political campaigning is one hell of a personal development program, and the day spent in Liverpool was a great time to reflect on what we are doing and regain some perspective as to why we do it.

One of the key factors of, and lessons taken, from the day was that there was so much common ground between the various causes represented. Louise and I went for a pint with another attendee afterwards, and we all agreed that those campaigns that received the higher funding were well deserving of it, and there was absolutely no resentment or disappointment felt in not being among them; on the contrary, it was humbling to be considered alongside a number of the causes there that day.

Thank you very much for the funding day. It restored my faith to know that there are so many conscientious people acting to prevent evil from succeeding.

HASL, as a part of London Coalition Against Poverty, received a grant of £1500 in October 2018. We recently caught up with them to hear how this grant has helped their organising.

HASL has continued to grow in the past year, with Edge funding that has helped us to have the space and resources for two local meetings a month, with 50 – 100 members there each time.

HASL group meeting.

Our group works on a lot of different housing issues that people face in South London. Having meetings where members can come together regularly to share their problems update on progress is the main way that the whole group supports each other. We mostly organise in Southwark and Lambeth, but sometimes people travel from neighbouring boroughs.

Many of our members have been able to access secure social housing with the support of the group, with several major successes in the past year. These successes have all been the result of many months, sometimes years, of persistent casework with HASL. This depends on regular meetings.

Our group supports each other to understand the complexities of housing lists in different boroughs, to get complaints to local authorities to be acted upon, to stand up for ourselves in homelessness assessments, and to refer our cases to ombudsmen or the courts.

We run various campaigns on the immediate housing issues we face, as well as campaigning for more council housing, especially 3, 4 and 5 bed homes that are desperately needed. In the past year our protests have been:

These protests were picked up in the local press (here and here) and have pressured local authorities is providing a solution to members that had been ignored until then.

HASL protest demanding homeless families be rehomed close to where their children go to school.

When members have successes and experience about how to stand up for their rights, they help others joining the group or in the wider community. Recently we have started to reach out to other local groups by organising workshops about housing rights in a local primary school, with the English for Action group. We also ran a workshop on organising practical solidarity and collective support at the Anarchist Festival in North London.

Edge fund has helped us with the basic running costs which are increasing with our growing group. We really appreciate the supportive and solidarity based nature of the Edge Fund application process.

A massive thanks all of our members and previously funded groups for their hard work in scoring applications!

The next step in our grant giving process is our Funding Day in Liverpool on Saturday 1st June, Quakers 22 School Ln, Liverpool L1 3BT, where the shortlisted groups and our members will come together to vote on which groups will get the larger grants. Check out our report on Round 9’s funding day, to see what’s involved!

We've received almost 200 applications in this funding round from grassroots groups across the UK and Ireland. Our members and previously funded groups will now be reading applications and collectively working out how to share out the funds.

Some key dates for your diaries:

Friday 3rd May - Shortlisted groups announced

Saturday 1st June - Funding Day in Liverpool with members and shortlisted groups

We are now open for our first funding round of the year! We will be giving around £40,000 to about 30 grass-roots groups, campaigning for effective social change. We will be accepting applications until Sunday 24th February.

The funding process is democratic and participatory, and involves people directly affected by the issues you are campaigning on. We hope this makes the process fair and accountable to applicants and out members. Please check out this page for a little more information about our funding process works.

The deadline for applications is Midnight on 24th February.

You will find out if you are short-listed toward the end of April, and grants will paid out from the start of June.

We need your support!

Donations

We can only open for applications when we have raised enough money for a funding round. We welcome donations large and small, and particularly small monthly donations of £5 or £10 as they help us plan for the future. Please donate if you can, so we can keep supporting those taking action for a just and equal world.

Publicity

Help us get the word out! Follow us on twitter or sign up for our email list here. Please help us reach people and groups who don’t normally hear about funding opportunities – share this post or via social media and email but don’t forget to also tell people at meetings, events etc, especially if you know they are not often online. We have leaflets and cards we can send to anyone who can help distribute them to people and groups who might be interested in applying. Get in touch if you can help. Thank you!

Open Lavs are a group developing an app for nonbinary, queer and non gender conforming people to find public toilets and bathrooms across the UK that can be used by them, as well as to campaign for gendered toilets to be made open for all to use. Below is a testimonial from them on our Round 9 funding day in late October 2018.

One unseasonably cold early winter morning, I got up ridiculously early and got the train from London to Manchester. After getting lost many times despite the full cornucopia of technological tools available to me, I settled nervously in Bridge 5 Mill to the sight of not just one but two familiar faces (a public transport campaigner friend and an old friend's ex). Turns out there's a small pool of people doing the kind of work that Edge Fund is happy to give to, and half of us know each other!

We all had to introduce our projects to the wider group and I read verbatim from the bits of paper I'd tried to memorise on the train (but for the sheep in the fields! and the horses!). I might have lain it on a bit thick, but for me the rampant transphobia we're witnessing in this country is an obvious sign of the creeping fascism across the world, and that's something my project 'open lavs' hopes to dissect and dismantle a bit through its radical simplicity. We're a tool to map out all the unisex loos across the UK (in pubs, shops, museums etc) so that those of us who are likely to be victims of anti-queer harassment in public toilets (the trans people, the genderqueer people, the butch lesbians misread as men, the femme men misread as women, and the whole lot of our amazing family) know where we can spend a penny without all that nonsense.

We all did 'market stalls' where we set out our projects' purposes to each other and got a chance to speak to other groups to get a feel for them and their ethos. My G-d, I'm always uplifted and buoyed by what we're doing faced with the shittiest of circumstances. There were groups fighting against climate breakdown, against an unfair and cruel judiciary, against detention centres; groups fighting for a better world but finding brick walls where they need to find funding to continue their necessary and all-too-often underappreciated work. Thankfully, Edge Fund steps in here with its democratic, egalitarian approach to fund-giving. Everyone decided which project they would dole out their allotted chickpeas to, and open lavs thankfully came out with the most and so was given the full award!

There were so many amazing, worthy and worthwhile projects and whilst I'm so grateful Open Lavs got funding, literally any other group in that room would have been as deserving. I can say that freely now that the hard sell is over and the funds are safely in the Open Lavs account! I made some new friends - I even got food poisoning with one the other day from the dodgy but great veggie Indian buffet on Chapel Market (you know the one). But more than anything, open lavs can now really start doing its own small but important mission: helping people find already-existing loos they can use without fear. Thank you Edge Fund for making this possible, and for making the process transparent, trusting and beautifully collaborative.